A New York City Fiscal Crisis created by Mad Money Mayor

Its really interesting to look back over the years that I have been in New York City, hard times indeed. These years included two major crisis that challenged New York City from 1970-1977 and 1989-1993.

Not once during these times did I ever hear of any financial genius by the name of Mr. Bloomberg. Nowhere in New York City’s history is there any record of Mr. Bloomberg’s financial finesse saving the day during these times.

“Over the 1978-88 recovery and growth period, New York City sharply reduced the mountain of debt it had inherited from the fiscal crisis. In the current recovery and growth period (dating from 1994), the city’s debt burden has become heavier relative to ability-to-pay.”–New York City’s Year 2000 Challenge

Mayor Bloomberg did not reduce debt in the cushy years of Wall Street “banking” out its faulty derivatives via hedge funders and private equity firms with the help of their manipulation of Mr. Bloomberg’s modelling software. On the contrary, he spent madly, he cut city services and enlarged the ever so ironically named “public service” sector. He dipped into his or his fellow billionaires’ pockets for the City’s tourism budget lines and other lines he could not properly manage within the City’s own funds. He did not save for a rainy day!

He made life absolutely miserable for the average New Yorker, the middle class, by stripping them of any city service, including health, police and fire department and safe housing. Absurdly, they got charged a significant part of their income while receiving nothing in return for such taxation except continually reduced services and the hardships caused by Mr. Bloomberg’s excesses for the wealthy and well subsidized poor.

He made life divine for big corporation retailers and Wall Street, tourists and immigrants. You will see the evidence in the public hearings where there are front rows of the porky pigs he took care of waving their fancy signs, privileges etc.

Not to say that any of us in the upper lower class or middle class wanted to be taken care of or had been in the past. Its just that after 30 years of forking over a significant amount designated as a cushion for hard times we found there was no such cushion though the City was flush.

How can any normal or honest person say the city is safer? I have experienced shootouts in my building, on my street, in the stores at normal hours. I have been threatened going to work by a man with a knife. No police saved me, I had to handle it. I never encountered these problems before Bloomberg came to office. I never encountered people en masse smoking everywhere in the City while walking and aimlessly throwing cigarette butts at people. We never had such disorder in the City before. We never had to walk in a shanty town first stopping to see if a crane was hovering about or not. We never had such high visibility of rats in the subways. They never were on the platforms and in the station. New York City is responsible for keeping up the stations, they get paid to do it, though they’ll deny it at 311. The above described chaos is called allocating and budgeting by Mayor Bloomberg.

“Between 2000 and 2007, New York’s tax receipts grew by 41% after inflation. “That’s something that’s never happened or come close to happening in the city’s modern history,” says Nicole Gelinas, who follows municipal finance at the Manhattan Institute. This windfall had everything to do with the Wall Street bull market, and everyone knew that the rate of growth was unsustainable. Instead of using the flush-year surpluses to put New York’s fiscal house in order, however, Mr. Bloomberg mostly squandered them…

The four big costs to New York’s budget are Medicaid, pensions, debt and health care for public employees. Since the mayor took office seven years ago, those costs are up 57% after inflation. His handling of the city’s debt is particularly disappointing, if not irresponsible, since debt-service payments are legal obligations that can’t be suspended during economic slowdowns.”